Editorials
Made-for-TV Movie ‘Intensity’ is an Underseen Thanksgiving Horror Gem
The pool of Thanksgiving horror movies is relatively shallow, with only a handful of requisite titles -like Blood Rage or ThanksKilling– popping up every year. But there’s one glaring omission from the annual Thanksgiving horror discussion: 1997’s made-for-TV movie, Intensity. Based on Dean Koontz’s 1995 novel, this psychological thriller leans into its Thanksgiving setting while going long on the propulsive cat-and-mouse game between a killer and his unwitting prey.
Intensity follows Chyna Sheperd (Molly Parker), a loner with a twisted childhood full of abuse and neglect. She’s comfortable keeping a wall up between herself and everyone around her, which makes her waitress job ideal. Her job’s transactional nature offers her the desired amount of social interaction without having to forge deeper relationships. Against her better judgment and arguments, Chyna reluctantly agrees to accompany her coworker, Laura Templeton (Deanna Milligan), home for Thanksgiving. The Templeton family welcomes Chyna with open arms, but she barely has time to flirt with Laura’s brother before serial killer Edgler Vess (John C. McGinley) sneaks in and begins to pick them off one by one.
Only Chyna survives by hiding in the back of his RV. When she discovers he’s holding a young girl captive, she decides to follow him home.
It’s a setup that likely sounds all too familiar thanks to the more popular New French Extremity horror movie High Tension, released in native France only six years later. It doesn’t help that both rely on the palpable suspense of a heroine continually looking for new places to hide and evade detection by a rampaging killer. It’s not just the slick polish or the theatrical and international attention that pushed High Tension into the forefront, but the brutal violence and bloodletting, too. Intensity, made for Fox television, keeps the bloodshed to the absolute minimum thanks to TV censors. Luckily, it compensates with psychological terror. Intensity also has the benefit of time; its three-hour runtime gives a much broader scope and the room to build character development.
Intensity aired in two parts over two nights. It’s roughly halfway through the first part that Chyna, who’d hidden in the back of Edgler’s RV with the corpse of Laura, seeks aid from the attendants where Edgler has stopped to gas up his vehicle. It’s just as intense as the similar sequence in High Tension, except this version proves far more pivotal as the inciting event that fuels the rest of the lengthy feature. It’s here that Chyna stops seeking to save herself and instead fixates on rescuing Edgler’s captive. It’s also here where Edgler realizes he has a stowaway, sparking a new game for the killer. In other words, the tense gas station sequence marks the vastly diverging paths between the two similar films.
Once home, the mind games and interplay between Edgler and Chyna grow more disturbing, especially when flashbacks reveal Chyna’s harrowing past. McGinley excels at playing a creep, and Edgler’s monologues of his death fetishes and the thrill of committing murder go far in the psychological horror aspect of Intensity. Director Yves Simoneau, working from a teleplay adaptation by Stephen Tolkin, deftly bypasses television’s limitations to create suspense and dread. There’s still plenty of shocks and scares, especially for 1997, found in this miniseries. Even without the gore, one scene in which Chyna nearly gives up after struggling to free herself serves as an effective precursor to the far more visceral degloving of Gerald’s Game.
The film never lets Thanksgiving stray too far from memory, either.
The holiday gets mentioned at nearly every opportunity outside of the ill-fated Thanksgiving that kicks off Chyna’s harrowing journey. Chyna encounters and seeks aid from a passerby, Miriam (Piper Laurie), who tries to chalk Chyna’s hysterics up to the loneliness that Thanksgiving can induce. The gas station attendants heat Thanksgiving-themed tv dinners, though Edgler ensures they won’t get a chance to give thanks. The cop in search of the missing girl, Edgler’s captive, sees his Thanksgiving interrupted. That it’s a holiday break for many proves an added layer of complication when seeking aid from authorities, too. It may not go heavy on the iconography or décor, but the Thanksgiving setting shapes the story.
Between its made-for-TV origins and the fact that it’s out of print on DVD, Intensity is suspenseful Thanksgiving horror that’s slipped through the cracks. It might be tamer, violence-wise, compared to today’s standards, but Simoneau still injects plenty of psychological trauma and tension regardless. McGinley’s performance is magnetic, as usual, and there are some inventive action sequences and obstacles for Chyna to overcome. While much of the holiday’s horror leans hard into humor, Intensity offers a refreshing balance by leaning into its name to bring more intense, serious psychological horror to the Thanksgiving table.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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